Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

When the Commandant came in he was again holding the same two papers, but there was no campstool this time.

“Which?” he demanded tersely.

“Death,” Johnnie said simply.

The Commandant looked at him hard, for a long time. Then he said, equally simply, “I think you are right.”

“Can I have one last favor?” asked Johnnie.

“If possible.”

“Can I have that paper? The one renouncing...”

The Commandant handed it to him. Johnnie put a match to it. Then he dropped it to the floor and scuffed his foot around on it until it wasn’t there anymore.

The death procession walked slowly toward the execution place, the Commandant at its head, Lyons in the center, flanked by two rows of three guards each, in stiff military formation. They came out into an open yard, with a pastel-blue sky overhead and clouds like gobs of shaving lather. A door in the cement wall facing them, ominous as the lid of a coffin standing upright, opened by itself before they had reached it. They filed in without breaking step. Then it closed after them, shutting out the light of Lyons’s last day.

It was dim inside. Incense sweetened the air, and tapers were burning like shimmering little fireflies along an altar, illumining from below the serene downcast face of Buddha, hope and belief of half the world. A priest stood off to one side.

This was not the death chamber itself, but a temple just outside it, the last way station just before eternity.

They halted briefly, and the Commandant turned to Lyons. “Would you like to pray?” he asked him respectfully.

“I’ll take mine straight,” said Lyons shortly.

“He will say one for you, then,” said the Commandant, indicating the priest.

“Thanks,” said Lyons. “That I won’t object to.” And as they moved on toward the rear, he suddenly added, “And to show my appreciation—” Impulsively he jerked loose the little chamoisskin pouch that he had worn around his neck ever since his arrest — they had examined it, of course — and placed the huge diamond it contained in a little lacquered dish that stood there on the altar to receive any last gifts the condemned might wish to make as they moved on by toward the death place.

Back to the god it belonged to, at long last.

Behind the temple was the execution place. They led him over where the rope was and turned him around, and he, of his own accord, neatly fitted his feet in between the chalkmarks traced on the floor that showed the place he was to stand.

And as he stood there, he was saying a prayer of a sort after all. His lips moved noticeably, and his eyes had a concentrated — and yet faraway — look. Not a prayer a church would know, not a prayer for himself or for his own soul. Not a prayer at all, maybe.

He was saying the names of the states. Not all in the right order — he’d never been that good in geography. And he couldn’t get them all in; the time they gave him was too short. But he did what he could while he stood there.

“Arizona, Alabama, Arkansas...”

The ready-made noose was deftly fitted around his neck, and closed until it hugged him tight.

“North Carolina, South Carolina, Delaware...”

The executioner tugged at the upright lever with both arms, like a railroad switchman throwing open a section of track. The floor shot open under him, and he was gone, head all the way over to the side.

Ruth Lyons, still wearing the pallor of the four years of imprisonment that only the American Occupation had brought to an end, walked slowly along the gravelly cemetery path to where the grave was.

She crouched beside it when she had reached it, and arranged the flowers she had brought with her around the little upright stone marker, but in such a way as not to obliterate it. Then she stood in silence looking down at it.

It had just four words on it, above his initials. They had told her for what reason he had died. She knew now he would have wanted that to be on there. The words on the marker were:

The detective caught Al after about a three-block run. That is, it would have been a three-block run if it had been properly sectioned off into blocks. In that case he wouldn’t have caught him at all, for the detective was a good deal heavier, had a sizable paunch to push ahead of him, and Al was running for his life. Or at least his freedom, a possible ten-to-twenty years of it, and that can make a man really run.

But there were no separate blocks — it was a straightaway, an ocean pier, as a matter of fact. Al was sealed in, couldn’t get off on either side. Along the first stretch, if he jumped over the rail to the sand below he’d stand out like a black dot on a white die-cube — the beach was that bright under a seven-eighths moon. And with Al down there, the detective could have used a gun on him — there were no bathers around any more. Farther out, if he jumped over the rail, he had a choice between getting away dead-drowned or being rescued with a handcuff. He couldn’t swim a splash.

It was a cul-de-sac, and a beauty. The detective couldn’t have done better if he’d blueprinted the whole thing ahead of time.

So he caught him.

His hand came down on Al like a ton of bricks and they both staggered to a stop. For a minute they were both too winded to say anything. They just stood there breathing a gale between them. But the detective wasn’t too bushed to shift his hold from Al’s shoulder, which wasn’t too secure a place, to a double lock at the hack of the coat collar and the cuff of one sleeve.

By this time people had formed a ring around them, the two of them posing in a tableau, in what was obviously a still life of a just-enacted arrest. Neither one of them cared about that — the detective because it was part of his profession to make arrests in public, AI because he was caught now, stuck, on the wrong side of the law, and these people couldn’t help him. He knew they couldn’t, and also he knew they wouldn’t even if they could.

Al managed to speak first. “What’s it for, copper? I’m not out of bounds down here.”

“You’re out of bounds any place you lift a bundle of dough.”

Al’s voice shrilled to a squeak. “For Pete’s sake, I didn’t do no such thing!”

“Then wha’d you run for?”

“I have a record, and you know it. I don’t stand a prayer.”

“You gave yourself away by running this time. D’you bust out running every time a patrolman starts over to check on you?”

“Not when I see them just walking towards me. But you were already running after me when I turned and looked. I just lost my head, is all.”

“You lost your immunity, is all,” the detective told him. “C’mon back and we’ll take it up with her.”

They started back along the pier, trailing a cloud of buzzing spectators like a wedge-shaped swarm of bees coming to a point behind a pair of leaders. Al was too experienced an arrestee to waste his breath making any further pleas. If they were going to listen at all, they’d listen from the original stopping position. Once they started moving you off with them, the time for listening was over. Al knew that as well as he knew his own name.

The concessionaire was a very large woman. Large-size women seem to make better concessionaires — they stand out more against their usually garish backgrounds. She was blonde to the point of silveriness, shrewdly made up to take a few years off at the top, and tough as a 25-cent steak. Her pitch was a refreshment stand — hamburgers, frozen custard, soft drinks, hot dogs — So fresh they bite you, one little sign said.